why that distro (was: New PHP 4.3.8 RPMS Released)

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 05:32:40PM +1000, Michael Mansour wrote:
> 
> For me, I just don't like to see "bad press" about an OS that was production 
> quality and ran in production just fine, sure it had a couple of hiccups, just 
> like any other OS does,

I bumped into a considerable number of such "hiccups" with RH8.
This was a while ago and I may not remember all details but
basically regular expressions (grep, perl, awk, sed, ...) were
broken and/or extremely slow, emacs and other editors had weird
issues, man was broken totally, a strange stuff was happening
randomnly on desktops, whatever you touched related on i18n had big
chances to misbehave, other problems.  Binaries for rpm I replaced
very quickly with what was available from www.rpm.org, so this was
not a show stopper, but other things kept me from considering that
distro for anything but a test installation.  I think that a switch
to utf8 was underlying most of that and switching to other LANG was
not a good enough answer.  From my point of view RH9 was a huge step
forward.  This is what my wife used on her laptop, and this is a
tougher coundition that it may sound, :-) although now it is FC2.

> but to say the least it was certainly still better 
> than Windows production servers.

Well, by such criteria mostly anything will be acceptable.
How this is called?  "Damning by a faint praise"? :-)

  Michal